UK under serious terror threat from home-grown Jihadis, warns expert

Published: Saturday, June 13, 2009, 13:32 [IST]

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London, June 13 (ANI): A British defence expert has warned the UK police and MI5 to get ready to counter a new generation of home-grown Jihadis.ichael Clarke, director of the defence think tank, the Royal United Services Institute, warned that violent Islamic terrorists intent on murdering people in high-profile outrages "will not wither away".

"The phenomenon will not wither away in the near future: it is likely to be generational. All the available evidence is that radicalization of alienated Muslim youth in the UK can taken place very rapidly as long as it is based somewhere on personal contact," Sky News quoted Clarke, as saying.

He warned that a series of successful police operations might have turned prisons into "universities of terror."

"Prisons around the world are universities of terror and there is no reason to believe that the UK's will not be the same. The 90-odd convictions, of which the security services can be proud, will have their own longer-term consequences for which the government must be prepared," Clarke said.

He said security services may look back at the last eight years as a "golden age of counter terrorism" marked by success and good luck.

"Most of the plotters have left behind a trail of forensics behind that has led some police professionals to predict that this will seem like a golden age of counter terrorism, when we were both successful and lucky," he said.

Clarke said the evolution of recruitment and terrorist techniques of British cells is "entirely possible" as they learn from their mistakes.

A research paper, Terrorism in the United Kingdom: Confirming its modus operandi, found that semi-trained British terrorists are having less contact with core al Qaida figures in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

But the paper said al Qaeda remains an "inspiration" for British cells, who recruit potential terrorists and groom them for violence. (ANI)